“To me playing a festival like this, I don’t want them to come and say I saw The Flaming Lips or I saw this group, or that group. I want them to say all those groups were there, but it’s all the things I did with my friends. That’s your life. To think it’s about us, just seems silly.”

“If you’re too cool and you resist that tug of enthusiasm and love, and just letting it all go, you are going to miss out on the best shit in life.”

Jessie Baylin

“ I’ve done some things here and met some people here. I met my husband (Nathan Followill of Kings of Leon) by the porta-potties. I offered him a bite of my strawberry shortcake. And I’m still giving him bites of my strawberry shortcake.”

“It’s amazing that Kings of Leon started at the smallest stage, and now they’re headlining. What a wild ride, what a wild Bonnaroo ride.”

Brandi Carlile

“This festival reminds us that music has never been the problem. It’s industry. It just makes us feel proud to see people standing around, wanting to hear music. Nothing else matters.”

“People congregating for music has a powerful energy that I’m always happy to be a part of, whether I’m on stage or I’m a part of the audience. We all gathered around one microphone with an unplugged ukulele, and we didn’t think it was going to work, but because this crowd loves music so much, there were just thousands of people that were just quiet the whole time. I was blown away, I was moved by it, it was really great.”

Matt Berninger – The National

“You meet a lot of people who are sort of drifting around the world, this sort of nomad’s life. You meet a lot of your heroes and you discover a lot of new music. So it’s fun. These little backstage zones are these just bizarre stews of creative weirdos and it’s really fun to be here.”

“The big festival crowds you can’t phone it in. Even if you’ve done 15 shows in a row, you have to just sort of lose yourself in the songs, because there’s all these people that paid a lot of money and driven hours and hours, you can’t think about yourself. You just have to think about the music and the event, and put every bit of fashion into it. We were doing that in little bars, pretending we were playing giant festivals in our brains. So we always go to the same place, even now, except now there’s actually people.”
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Bo Burnham

“I’m part of this Generation Y, this younger generation, and everyone’s worried about them not buying music, but you look around and see how interested kids are in live music and the music culture. I don’t think people should be too worried about that, I dunno, maybe multi-millionaires will become millionaires.”

Brian Bell (Weezer)

“I’m from Knoxville and one of the reasons I left is because there was nothing like this. There were no opportunities for musicians to do anything with a career in music. Maybe if this was here I maybe never would have left.”

Stefan Lessard

“There’s still a real urge to see live bands and live music. For someone to say this is my big splurge and I’m going to see all these bands. It’s great that there’s an outlet for bands to do this. You can’t get these types of crowds everywhere, and people are having to save money right now, so it’s kind of an all for one great deal.”

“There’s a lot of people coming up to me saying this is my first live show, which is great, because you know there’s always new fans. It’s as if you just walked into a club in Europe where you’re playing to 50% new fans. So you’re really going to try to work hard to win those fans over. So when you see the outskirts packing in around the crowd, you feel good.”

Sarah Jarosz

“There is so much build up to this. Everyone counts down the days until Bonnaroo, and now it’s here.”